A Home Alone star is looking back at their career and why they decided to step away from acting.
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We’re talking about Macaulay Culkin, of course.
Culkin was one of the biggest child stars of his era. But he chose to step away from acting in 1994. The truth is that Culkin just wanted to be a kid.
“What I wanted is to be with people my own age. You have to remember: a lot of the stuff I did when I was a kid… I’m not doing ensembles. It’s me,” Culkin shared while appearing on Mythical Kitchen.
“You’ll watch Home Alone, and I go, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m in Castaway, except he had a volleyball to talk to,’” he continued. It felt very lonely for the child star.
For most of the original film, he filmed alone.
‘Home Alone’ Star Speaks Out
“People will be like, ‘Oh, what was it like working with Joe Pesci?’ I’m like, ‘Have you seen the movie?’ We do maybe two scenes together. And then me, in a house, by myself, almost home alone,” Culkin also said.
After filming Richie Rich in 1994, Culkin decided that he just wanted to live a normal life, Home Alone fame or not.
“I wanted to go out. And I wanted to date girls, and I wanted to hang out with people my own age. I wanted to, you know, go to a party,” he said. “I wanted to do those kind of things – I can’t tell you how many bar mitzvahs I missed.”
However, Culkin realized that it was hard for him to go back to just being a regular person after fame.
“For me, it kind of just happened,” he explained. “I didn’t really do a lot of tugging on my parent’s sleeve, saying, ‘Mummy, daddy, I want to be famous – I want to do movies.’ I kind of just started doing it. And I was good at it and I kept booking it.”
Culkin said he fell into acting after his father took his older siblings to get headshots done.
“And my mom just wanted a break and was like, ‘Take Mac with you.’ Out of the gate — My first audition it was just like, booked, booked, booked,” he said. “It’s funny, this is a line of work — I didn’t find it. It found me. That’s kind of why I came back around to it.”
Culkin wouldn’t return to acting until 2003. He has appeared in projects periodically since then.